Bill Frezza is a 35-year veteran of the technology industry. After graduating from MIT with degrees in both science and engineering, Bill spent his early years at Bell Laboratories. Since then, he has worked as a product manager, salesman, marketer, entrepreneur, consultant, technology evangelist, and venture capitalist. Bill holds seven patents and has been investing in early-stage tech startups for the last 17 years as a partner in a venture capital firm. Since 2008, he has been writing weekly opinion columns for publications such as RealClearMarkets.com, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post and Bio-IT World and appeared regularly on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and WBAL. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Hoiles Prize for excellence in American journalism and in October 2013, he became the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2013-2014 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow. In January 2014, Bill began hosting RealClear Radio Hour airing Saturdays on Boston’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.

Redefining Race and Ethnicity In the Shadow of the Trayvon Martin Shooting

Judging by the turmoil fueled by media opportunists of all political stripes, the Trayvon Martin story has a long way to run. As the odds of learning what really happened fade under the weight of dueling narratives and misinformation campaigns, it will eventually become impossible for most people to figure out whether justice has been served.

As discouraging as this is, perhaps some good can come from senseless tragedy. One element of the story opens the door to a line of thought that has received too little attention: the subject of racial and ethnic categorization.

Initial news reports indicated that the shooter, George Zimmerman, was white. This was later corrected to Hispanic before the New York Times chose to go with the label white Hispanic, perhaps because it fit better with the sensationalist image of a racist gated community. This kicked up a fit of commentary on both the right and the left. The former accused the Times of race baiting, while the latter worried that efforts to acknowledge the reality of racial and ethnic mixing could undermine the class identity politics that lie at the root of leftist activism.

Exactly. Which is why such a line of questioning is way overdue.

What is a Hispanic, anyway? I remember my own education on this subject back during the Carter administration. I arrived at Bell Labs as a fresh faced engineer and was immediately forced to attend white male guilt classes (today known as diversity training) as part of a consent decree AT&T had signed with the Justice Department. This decree imposed an affirmative action program on what was then the nation’s largest private employer, a wedge into the private sector which the EEOC used to great effect as the age of affirmative action got underway.

The purpose of the classes was to inculcate the acceptance of hiring, salary, and promotion policies that favored certain employees over others by virtue of their gender, race, and ethnicity. I had a clear understanding of gender, was skeptical that an unambiguous legal definition of race could really be defined, and was certain that ethnicity was a social construct that could never withstand rational scrutiny.

The paid professional agitator who ran the classes eventually tired of my questioning and told me to shut up and mind my place. Not being well suited to either, I was kicked up the chain of command from my supervisor to my department head to my director, none of whom could explain the reasoning behind the company’s affirmative action policies. It seems that AT&T categorized the ethnicity of employees based on surname. Someone, somewhere had a list of Hispanic surnames, and if you had one you got counted toward the quota and received additional unspecified consideration toward raises and promotions.

“Do you mean,” I asked, “That a blonde haired, blue eyed Swede and heir to the Wallenberg fortune would be categorized as Hispanic if his last name was Rodriguez?” Yes.

I eventually landed in the office of my executive director, who was none too pleased. Looking me dead in the eye he said, “Son, you work for a company whose monopoly of the telephone business is a gift from the Federal Government. You know and I know that this affirmative action program is a crock. But if we give them what they want, maybe they will let us keep what we want. Got it?”

For some reason, that satisfied me and I went back to work without having the pleasure of meeting the company’s vice president.

So here we are 34 years later and the New York Times wants us to recognize the special place that white Hispanics occupy in society—which implies that different special places also exist for black Hispanics, brown Hispanics, and maybe even yellow and red Hispanics. No word yet on Swedish Hispanics, but I’m sure they are out there.

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‘White Hispanic,’ very rarely used in media (as opposed to the Census, etc.) is an accurate term in some cases. For example: Pitbull, Charlie Sheen, Alexis Bledel. These folks’ ancestors come from Spanish-speaking countries (Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba), but their genetics are 100% European. But the mainstream media refers to people like Jessica Alba, Selena Gomez, and Victoria Justice as ‘Hispanic’–full stop, no hyphen and ‘White.’ This is despite the fact that they have one White (European) parent and one Mestizo (Spanish-Amerindian) parent, were born in the USA, grew up speaking English as a first language, and one of them has an ‘Anglo’ name. Yet George Zimmerman–with a Peruvian/Mestizo mother–is called ‘WHITE Hispanic.’ Why?

The reason is that the MSM are trying desperately to salvage their original narrative: ‘white racist kills little black boy.’ Behind all of the complex and convoluted rationalizations for using a hitherto unused (in the mainstream media) term like ‘White Hispanic,’ this is why they’re doing it.

Agent666, you are correct. These categories and definitions are created by the federal govt and have no meaning. if your ancestors are from spain, you are “White Hispanic” but if your ancestors are from Italy you are “White,” even though Sicily would be arguably less “European” than Northern Spain. The categories and distinctions are a joke. Many that most strongly identify as “Hispanic” speak Spanish poorly or not at all. “Latino” is even worse. What is a “Latino?” Would Julius Cesar qualify or was he “white”? There is, as the author states, no substance behind any of these categories. We have done nothing but divide our country into categories for the past 30 years and now we wonder why we are so profoundly divided.

There is one simple thought but I´m sure that it comes from God. If a black man marries a wite woman they can have a son or a daughter. The same is valid for all of the races, and vice-versa. WE HUMANS ARE THE SAME KIND! We don´t need to explain more than this. It´s simply unreasonable thing separate ourselves by races! GOD CREATED US LIKE WE ARE! —but I have a comment on this article, please don´t judge by one bad protestant all the other Christians! True Christians are the only people I know in the World that ARE REALY SURE about all races are the same ISSUE! Why ISSUE, because GOD HAS JUST PROJECTED/CREATED ALL OF US WHO BREATH IN THE SAME AND IMPRESSIVE WAY! Just think about that and meditate deeply on this, then you will see with REASONABLE EYES THAT GOD WANTs to save all the humans and this SALVATION IS In JESUS CHRIST and REVEALED about 2012 Years. I recommend you to just believe on WHAT JESUS IS DOING NOWADAYS BECAUSE HE JUST LIVES! HE LIVES on our Hearts and He is living and sitting on a Magnificent Throne placed the Right side of GOD!